The Robert Louis Stevenson Trail

We decided some months ago to walk the R.L. Stevenson Trail in south central France or at least the core from Monastier to St Jean du Gard. R.L.Stevenson walked this in 1878 with a donkey to try to forget an American woman who had rejected his proposal of marriage. We booked with a tour company who organised the whole trip including hotel booking and baggage transfer. We could have organised the trip ourselves, but were worried about booking rooms in our schoolboy/schoolgirl French. There is however an excellent website giving many addresses (www.chemin-stevenson.org) not only about accommodation, but also baggage transfer and public transport. There is however little of the latter. Our feeling is, as long as someone in the party has some French that one could walk the route without assistance.  In half the hotels we stopped in nobody attempted to speak English or slow down their French. Early and late in the season you don't need to book.Two guide books would be useful:   “Le Chemin de Stevenson” TopoGuide, ISBN 978-2-7514-0500-6 for its 1:50000 maps, even if you don’t read French and “The Robert Louis Stevenson Trail” by Alan Castle from Cicerone (ISBN: 9781852845117) for detailed route and background descriptions in English. Alan Castle discusses buying the ten 1:25 000 IGN maps needed to cover the route, but we feel that the 1:50 000 maps in the TopoGuide plus the waymarking are more than adequate for easy navigation. We walked most of the way without using a map just using the waymarks. We walked the trail from 11 April which was perhaps a little early. There were stretches of snow and muddy track that would have dried up in a few weeks time. On the other hand we had no problems with high temperatures.

The waymarking is excellent but very varied:

The official GR 70 signpost

 You follow red and white stripes. This symbol means turn left.

 Locals, tired of being asked add their own notices:

 Sometimes the red and white stripes are painted on rocks:

 Other notices include an invitation to shelter from the rain:

 The wilder the country, the more informal the notices:

 However the tourist offices add standardisation:

 Turn right!

 Officialdom again

 The locals add signs to save time

 The mud in early April was interesting at times.